Nor did a vice minister feel the worst burden of rule-bearing responsibility for the lives of a quadrillion human beings.
Dors saw him drifting along in his own thoughts. Under her gentle urging, he sampled tasty savories and made small talk.
The gentry could be distinguished by their ostentatiously fashionable clothing, while the economists, generals and other meritocrats tended to wear the formal garb of their professions.
So he was making a political statement, after all, Hari realized. In wearing professor’s robes, he emphasized that there might be a non-gentry First Minister for the first time in forty years.
Not that he minded making that statement. Hari just wished he had done it on purpose.
Despite the official Ruellian ethos, the remaining three social classes seemed nearly invisible at the party.
The factotums wore somber costumes of brown or gray, with expressions to match. They seldom spoke on their own. Usually they hovered at the elbow of some aristo, supplying facts and even figures that the more gaily-dressed guests used in their arguments. Aristos generally were innumerate, unable to do simple addition. That was for machines.
Hari found that he actually had to concentrate in order to pick the fourth class, the Greys, out of the crowd. He watched them move, like finches among peacocks.
Yet their kind made up more than a sixth of Trantor’s population. Drawn from every planet in the Empire by the all-seeing Civil Service tests, they came to the Capital World, served their time like bachelor monks, and left again for outworld postings. Flowing through Trantor like water in the gloomy cisterns, the Greys were seldom thought of, as honest and commonplace and dull as the metal walls.
That might have been his life, he realized. It was the way out of the fields for many of the brighter children he had known at Helicon. Except that Hari had been plucked right over the bureaucracy, sent straight to academe by the time he could solve a mere eighth-order tensor defoliation, at age ten.
Ruellianism preached that “citizen” was the highest social class of all. In theory, even the Emperor shared sovereignty with common men and women.
But at a party like this, the most numerous Galactic group was represented mostly by the servants carrying food and drink around the hall, even more invisible than the dour bureaucrats. The majority of Trantor’s population, the laborers and mechanics and shopkeepers-the denizens of the 800 Sectors-had no station at a gathering like this. They lay outside the Ruellian ranking.
As for the Artes, that final social order was not meant to be invisible. Musicians and jugglers strolled among the guests, the smallest, most flamboyant class.
Even more dashing was an air-sculptor Hari spotted across the vast chamber, when Dors pointed him out. Hari had heard of the new art form. The “statues” were of colored smoke that the artist exhaled in rapid puffs. Shapes of eerie, ghostlike complexity floated among the bemused guests. Some figures clearly made fun of the courtly gentry, as puffy caricatures of their ostentatious clothes and poses.
To Hari’s eye, the smoke figures seemed entrancing…until they started drifting apart into tatters, without substance or predictability.
“It’s all the mode,” he heard one onlooker remark. “I hear the artist comes straight from Sark! “
“The Renaissance world?” another asked, wide-eyed. “Isn’t that a little daring? Who invited him?”
“The Emperor himself, it’s said.”
Hari frowned. Sark, where those personality simulations came from. “Renaissance world,” he muttered irritably, knowing now what he disliked about the smoke shapes: their ephemeral nature. Their intended destiny, to dissolve into chaos.
As he watched, the air-sculptor blew a satirical tableau. The first figure formed of crimson smoke, and he did not recognize it until Dors elbowed him and laughed. “It’s you!”
He clamped his gaping mouth shut, unsure how to handle the social nuances. A second cloud of coiling blue streamers formed a clear picture of Lamurk, eyebrows knotted in fury. The foggy figures hovered in confrontation, Hari smiling, Lamurk scowling.
And Lamurk looked the fool, with bulging eyes and pouting lips.
“Time for a graceful exit,” Hari’s lieutenant whispered. Hari was only too glad to agree.
When they got home, he was sure that there had been a bit extra in the stim he was handed, something that freed his tongue. Certainly it was not the slow-spoken, reflective Seldon who had traded jabs with Lamurk. He would have to watch that.
Dors simply shook her head. “It was you. Just a portion of you that doesn’t get out to play very much.”
6.
“Parties are supposed to cheer people up,” Yugo said, sliding a cup of kaff across Hari’s smooth mahogany desktop.
“Not this one,” Hari said.
“All that luxury, powerful people, beautiful women, witty hangers-on-I think I could have stayed awake.”
“That’s what depresses me, thinking back over it. All that power! And nobody there seems to care about our decline.”
“Isn’t there some old saying about-”
“Fiddling while Roma burns. Dors knew it, of course. She says it’s from pre-Empire, about a Zone with pretensions of grandeur. ‘ All worms lead to Roma’ is another one.”
“Never heard of this Roma.”
“Me either, but pomposity springs forth eternal. It looks comic in retrospect.”
Yugo moved restlessly around Hari’s office. “So they don’t care?”
“To them it’s just backdrop for their power games.” Already the Empire had worlds, Zones, and even whole arcs of spiral arms descended into squalor. Still worse, in a way, was a steady slide into garish amusements, even vulgarity. The media swarmed with the stuff. The new “renaissance” styles from worlds like Sark were popular.
To Hari the best of the Empire was its strands of restraint, of subtlety and discretion in manners, finesse and charm, intelligence, talent, and even glamour. Helicon had been crude and rural, but it knew the difference between silk and swine.
“What do the policy types say?” Yugo sat halfway on Hari’s desk, avoiding the control functions implanted beneath a woody veneer. He had come in with the kaff as a pretext, fishing for gossip about the exalted. Hari smiled to himself; people relished some aspects of hierarchy, however much they griped about it.
“They’re hoping some of the ‘moral rebirth’ movements-like revised Ruellianism, say-will take hold. Put spine into the Zones, one of them said.”
“ Ummm.Think it’ll work?”
“Not for long.”
Ideology was an uncertain cement. Even religious fervor could not glue an empire together for long. Either force could drive formation of an empire, but they could not hold against greater, steady tides-principally, economics.
“How about the war in the Orion Zone?”
“Nobody mentioned it.”
“Think we’ve got war figured right in the equations?” Yugo had a knack for suddenly putting his finger on what was bothering Hari.
“No. War was an overesteemed element in history.”
Certainly war often gained center stage; no one continued to read a beautiful poem when a fist fight broke out nearby. But fist fights did not last, either. Further, they joggled the elbows of those trying to make a living. To engineers and traders alike, war did not pay. So why did wars break out now, with all the economic weight of the Empire against them?
“Wars are simple. But we’re missing something basic-I can feel it.”
“We’ve based the matrices on all that historical data Dors dug out,” Yugo said a bit defensively. “That’s solid.”
“I don’t doubt it. Still…”
“Look, we’ve got over twelve thousand years of hard facts. I built the model on that.”
“I have a feeling what we’re missing isn’t subtle.”
Most collapses were not from abstruse causes. In the early days of Empire consolidation, local minor sovereignties flourished, then died. There were recurrent themes in their histories.